Risk & Responsibility: Social Science Research as a Modern “Anti-Politics Machine”

This essay examines the distortions introduced into research agendas and research design by the effort to avoid seeming “political.” The rhetorical, institutional, and disciplinary operations of the social science research enterprise worldwide serve to divert attention from questions of power and collective accountability to a focus on technical interventions, institutional risk, and individual responsibility. These practices coincide with the specific circumstances of social science research in the Middle East and North Africa-where the exercise of political power in the form of international interference, irresponsible autocracy, civil disorder and violence, and protracted economic poverty and duress is difficult to conceal-to shape research terrains and agendas, and create a particularly, and tellingly, troubled research environment.